I completed a lot of updates that were in the works on iswapyou.com today. The site search was updated to make it easier to use – instead of having multiple options on it, it now searches and gives results for everything. I changed it on the advice of a few usability experts.

I also added options so users can easily sell things with paypal. You need to enable it through the account settings in your profile, and then check a box in the edit item dialog that says “sell with paypal”. The item also needs to have a price. Once all that is done a paypal “Buy now” button will show up, and you’ll be ready to accept cash.

Finally, some parts of your profile (your want list, for example) as well as the messaging system can be customized using an html editor called TinyMCE. This was the easiest, but possibly the coolest and in my opinion the most fun to play with, part of the update.

For the next update I’m testing extensions to the inventory and item information. You should be able to tag certain parts of your inventory, so it is easier to search. Also, items should have pictures – this has been in the pipeline for a long time, and i’ve already done it, it was just absolutely ugly the first time. Also, I’m working on a “portable” release that will allow you to install some of the Iswapyou community components on your site and start your own little community on the web.

I’ll be releasing components out of the new release on this blog – i’m thinking code/database schema out of the messaging system should be first. It’s a small component, and one that is useful for just about any community type site. If anyone has any requests for components to be released or to be the first that are made portable, let me know.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Code, Communities, HTML, Nerdgasms, community site building, php. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.